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Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart
Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart
Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart
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Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart

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This Whitbread Award–winning biography and basis for the film Mary Queen of Scots starring Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie “reads like Shakespearean drama” (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution).
 
“A triumph . . . A masterpiece full of fire and tragedy.” —Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana
 
In the first full-scale biography of Mary Stuart in more than thirty years, John Guy creates an intimate and absorbing portrait of one of history’s greatest women, depicting her world and her place in the sweep of history with stunning immediacy. Bringing together all surviving documents and uncovering a trove of new sources for the first time, Guy dispels the popular image of Mary Queen of Scots as a romantic leading lady—achieving her ends through feminine wiles—and establishes her as the intellectual and political equal of Elizabeth I.
 
Through Guy’s pioneering research and superbly readable prose, we come to see Mary as a skillful diplomat, maneuvering ingeniously among a dizzying array of factions that sought to control or dethrone her. Queen of Scots is an enthralling, myth-shattering look at a complex woman and ruler and her time.
 
“The definitive biography . . . Gripping . . . A pure pleasure to read.” —The Washington Post Book World
 
“Reads like Shakespearean drama, with all the delicious plotting and fresh writing to go with it.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Editor's Note

Definitive…

This biography of Mary, Queen of Scots, has quickly become the definitive text about the long-ago ruler. Author John Guy uncovered new primary source texts while doing research and paints a different picture than popular history touts.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 17, 2014
ISBN9780547526966
Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart
Author

John Guy

John Guy is an award-winning historian; an accomplished broadcaster; a fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge; and the author of Mary Queen of Scots, which won the Whitbread Award for Biography and the Marsh Biography Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Biography. He has contributed to numerous BBC programs and has written for the Sunday Times, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the Mail on Sunday, the Economist, the Literary Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and the London Review of Books.

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    One of the few books about Marry Quuen of Scots that doesn't paint her out to be a woman ruled by her passions. Very well researched and balanced story of her life and death.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a very thorough and interesting account about Mary Queen of Scots. The author, John Guy, attempts to answer the questions of the murder of her husband Lord Darnley, the marriage of Mary to Bothwell, and her plots against Elizabeth I. The author depicts Mary not as a "femme fatale" as many other historians have. He believes that she did not conspire to murder her husband. What is interesting is the extent to which the author explains the plot against Darnley and the whole marriage to Bothwell. He shows it from Mary's side, the lords' sides, and Bothwell's side.This is a long read (500 pages) but it is well worth it. John Guy is an exceptional writer and he sheds light on this very intriguing topic of Mary Queen of Scots who became queen as an infant and was beheaded after 18 years in captivity under Elizabeth I.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is a history of the world in which Mary Queen of Scot's was born into, lived her life in and eventually died in. The Renaissance of Europe. Although this is not an historical novel, by the end of the first chapter it had that feeling. Although the book is full of quotes, cites, etc., it is written in more of a narrative style than many other histories I have read. The reader does not need to have a strong background in Renaissance Europe (esp. Scotland, France, & England), the author, John Guy, is quite masterful at integrating needed historical knowledge with the story at hand. This history not only tells the story of Queen Mary, but much of Queen Elizabeth and her court, the French court (with whom Queen Mary had strong familial ties), etc. It is well worth the time... I found reading this story extremely enjoyable!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Another book/audio I wouldn't have picked up had it not shown up at my library page. I really enjoyed this book, I'm no expert on non-fiction but I am not always entertained when reading it in the case of Queen of Scots I was rarely distracted while listening because most of what I knew of Mary was somewhat romanticized by the film adaptations I've seen in the past. There were times while listening when I felt the author (and narrator) were somewhat painting Mary's decisions favorably, but this it's not the first time I encounter this problem when it's a historical figure. I suppose that if a person is invested enough in a historical figure to write a book it is because they are interested in them. Still, it's hard to overlook at times. It's not a long audio, and it's very to the point which I appreciate. I'd definitely keep an eye for more John Guy books in the future.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A concise, easy-to-read, and very manageable biography of Mary Stuart.

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Queen of Scots - John Guy

First Mariner Books edition 2005

Copyright © 2004 by John Guy

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Guy, J. A. (John Alexander)

Queen of Scots : the true life of Mary Stuart / John Guy.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-0-618-25411-8 |ISBN: 978-0-618-61917-7 (pbk.) ISBN: 978-1-328-63899-1 (tie-in)

1. Mary, Queen of Scots, 1542–1587. 2. Scotland—History—Mary Stuart, 1542–1567. 3. Great Britain—History—Elizabeth, 1558–1603. 4. Queens—Scotland—Biography. I. Title.

DA787-A1G89 2004

941.105'092—dc22 [B] 2003067592

Cover design by Christopher Moisan

Maps by Jacques Chazaud and Richard Guy

Cover illustration © Ossolinski National Institute of the Polish Academy of Science, Wroclaw

eISBN 978-0-547-52696-6

v7.0319

In memory of my mother

Princes at all times have not their wills, but my heart being my own is immutable.

Mary to Thomas Randolph, English ambassador to Scotland, March 8, 1564

Acknowledgments

WRITING THIS BOOK has been an exciting, invigorating experience, one of the most thrilling of my life, an adventure even for someone who had already worked on the historical records for a quarter of a century. I had no idea when I began that so much fresh material could be found in the archives about a woman who has been the daughter of debate for four centuries. Then, when I steadily began to uncover this material, I felt a sense of elation. I simply could not stop working on the book until I got to the bottom and the end of the story.

I’m deeply grateful for all the help and support I’ve received from the archivists and curators whose repositories and libraries I’ve ransacked for so many weeks and months. Monique Cohen and her staff at the Département des Manuscrits, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, showed me how to find what I needed in a library I’d never used before. In more familiar haunts, Dr. Sarah Tyacke and her team at the National Archives (Public Record Office), London, and the staff of the University Library at Cambridge were as helpful and courteous as ever. Dr. Andrea Clarke and her colleagues in the Department of Manuscripts at the British Library were always willing to assist me, supplying microfilms of key volumes of the Cottonian and Additional Manuscripts so that I could read them at home. I also thank the staff of the Rare Books Department for producing every copy in the collection of certain titles, including multiple copies of the same edition. Dr. Richard Palmer and his staff at Lambeth Palace Library offered me the opportunity to read newly acquired documents concerning Mary’s trial and execution, some of which had been out of the public domain for decades. I’m most grateful to the Trustees for access to this material.

In Edinburgh, my path was greatly eased by the reading room staff of the National Archives of Scotland, HM General Register House, and of the Department of Special Collections, National Library of Scotland. At St. Andrews University Library, Christine Gascoigne and her colleagues in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Department repeatedly came to my aid. For access to and permission to quote from the manuscripts of the old Advocates Library and other documents held at the George IV Bridge repository of the National Library of Scotland, I wish to thank the Trustees.

For access to the Cecil Papers at Hatfield House and for permission to cite them, I am most grateful to The Marquess of Salisbury, and to Robin Harcourt Williams, librarian and archivist. For access to and permission to quote from the manuscripts and rare books at the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California, I gladly thank Dr. Mary Robertson, chief curator of manuscripts, whom by a happy coincidence I first met in Sir Geoffrey Elton’s Tudor seminar in Cambridge some thirty years ago. For permission to read the manuscripts and rare books at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C., I acknowledge the generosity of Dr. Gail Kern Paster, director, and the Trustees.

Preliminary drafts of the maps and genealogical tables were drawn and digitized by Richard Guy of Orang-Utan Productions. For undertaking the picture research and obtaining loans of transparencies, I thank Sheila Geraghty, whose expertise was invaluable. My colleague Stephen Alford at Cambridge University read the entire manuscript in draft and I relished all of our lengthy conversations. Professor Michael Lynch, Department of Scottish History, University of Edinburgh, read and most generously commented on the uncorrected proofs. I’m grateful for his suggestions and list of corrections on the Scottish side, and for corrections supplied by Rachel Guy, who also read the page proofs. I accept full responsibility for such errors as may still remain.

Some academic historians may regret my spelling of Stuart in preference to Stewart for the dynasty. But Mary called herself Stuart; her motto, Sa virtu m’atire, works as a near-perfect anagram only if the family name is spelled Stuart; and it seemed likely to irritate readers if both Stuart and Stewart were used. I also prefer Ker of Fawdonside to the alternative Kerr, adopting the orthography of the manuscripts. And I’ve followed the example of Elizabeth I and William Cecil in styling James Hamilton, Third Earl of Arran, as Arran, after his father, the second earl, was made Duke of Châtelherault, even though he was not strictly Earl of Arran until his father died.

I’ve nothing but thanks and admiration for Peter Robinson and Emma Parry, my agents in London and New York, for their constant encouragement and for persuading me that I could write this book and make it work. Both read the manuscript and gave helpful advice. In preparing a book in which the interpretation counts for just as much as the archival research, I’ve also realized how much I’ve learned from the BBC producers with whom I’ve been privileged to work during the past four years, in particular Catrine Clay, Dick Taylor and Jane McWilliams.

I owe an immense debt to Eamon Dolan, my editor at Houghton Mifflin. His comments on my drafts were pitched exactly right, always helpful and to the point. I feel privileged to be published by Houghton Mifflin, whose magnanimity in allowing me to get on with my work uninterrupted for almost three years created the closest thing to ideal conditions. For assistance in the editorial and publicity stages, I also wish to thank Larry Cooper, Bridget Marmion, Lori Glazer, Whitney Peeling and Carla Gray.

I express heartfelt gratitude to my former students at the University of St. Andrews, and those I currently teach at Cambridge, for their contributions to seminars and supervisions where Mary made her appearance more often than she should have. Other debts are to Fiona Alexander, who saw instantly that the mysterious object Mary holds in her left hand in the placard of the mermaid and the hare, previously defying explanation, is a rolled-up net. Frances and David Waters offered constant encouragement, uncannily predicting the date on which I’d deliver the final manuscript, and making sure we had tickets for Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro for the very next night.

Most importantly, Julia accepted Mary’s presence in what must increasingly have seemed like a ménage à trois, showing infinite patience. She pored over innumerable drafts, reading some chapters as many as a dozen times and discussing Mary at all hours. I can never adequately thank her or repay her love. Emma was just as tolerant, never complaining that she hardly saw her father, and merely teasing him about when he’d finish the book. Lucy, Susie and Gemma sometimes got their paws into Mary’s affairs more than I might have liked, but in doing so kept me in touch with normality.

London

October 24, 2003

Prologue

AROUND EIGHT O’CLOCK in the morning on Wednesday, February 8, 1587, when it was light enough to see without candles, Sir Thomas Andrews, sheriff of the county of Northamptonshire, knocked on a door. The place was Fotheringhay Castle, about seventy-five miles from London. All that remains there now beneath the weeds is the raised earthen rampart of the inner bailey and a truncated mound, or motte, on the site of the keep, a few hundred yards from the village beside a sluggish stretch of the River Nene.

But in the sixteenth century the place was bustling with life. Fotheringhay was a royal manor. Richard III had been born at the castle in 1452. Henry VII, the first of the Tudor kings, who had slain Richard at the battle of Bosworth, gave the estate as a dowry to his wife, Elizabeth of York, and Henry VIII granted it to his first bride, Catherine of Aragon, who extensively refurbished the castle. In 1558, Elizabeth I inherited the property when she succeeded to the throne on the death of her elder sister, Mary Tudor.

Despite its royal associations, nothing had prepared Fotheringhay, or indeed the British Isles, for what was about to happen there. Andrews was in attendance on two of England’s highest-ranking noblemen, George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, and Henry Grey, Earl of Kent. The door on which he knocked was the entrance to the privy chamber of Mary Queen of Scots, dowager queen of France and for almost nineteen years Elizabeth’s prisoner in England.

The door opened to reveal Mary on her knees, praying with her bedchamber servants. Andrews informed her that the time was at hand, and she looked up and said she was ready. She rose, and her gentlewomen stood aside.

She was only forty-four. Born and brought up to be a queen, she walked confidently through the doorway as if she were once more processing to a court festival. Almost six feet tall, she had always looked the part. She had been fêted since her childhood in France for her beauty and allure. Charmante and la plus parfaite were the adjectives most commonly applied to her singular blend of celebrity. Not just physically mesmerizing with her well-proportioned face, neck, arms and waist, she had an unusual warmth of character with the ability to strike up an instant rapport. Always high-spirited and vivacious, she could be unreservedly generous and amiable. She had a razor-sharp wit and was a natural conversationalist. Gregarious as well as glamorous, she could be genial to the point of informality as long as her grandeur was respected. Many contemporaries remarked on her almost magical ability to create the impression that the person she was talking to was the only one whose opinion really mattered to her.

As a result of premature aging caused by the inertia and lack of exercise of which she had so bitterly complained during her long captivity, her beauty was on the wane. Her features had thickened and she had rounded shoulders and a slight stoop. Her face, once legendary for its soft white skin and immaculate, marble-like complexion, had filled out and become double-chinned. But captivity did not alter all things. Her small, deep-set hazel eyes darted as restlessly as ever, and her ringlets of auburn hair seemed as lustrous.

Mary had been awake for most of the night and had carefully prepared herself. This was to be her grandest performance, her greatest triumph; she had considered every detail.

Her clothes set the tone. She appeared to be dressed entirely in black apart from a white linen veil. Lace-edged and as delicate as gauze, it flowed down from her hair over her shoulders to her feet in the French style. Fastened to the top of the veil was a small white cambric cap. It just touched the tip of her forehead and was also edged with lace, leaving room for her curls to peek out at the sides. Her gown of thick black satin reached almost to the ground, where it was attached to her train. Trimmed with gold embroidery and sable, it was peppered with acorn buttons of jet, set with pearl.

A closer look revealed an outer bodice of crimson velvet and an underskirt of embroidered black satin, both visible where the gown was fashionably cut away. To bedeck it, Mary wore long, richly embroidered slashed sleeves in the Italian style, under which could be seen uncut inner sleeves of purple velvet. Her shoes were of the finest Spanish suede. Later someone observed that she wore sky-blue stockings embroidered with silver thread and held up by green silk garters, these on top of soft white stockings that she used to protect her skin from chafing.

She carried a crucifix of ivory in one hand and a Latin prayer book in the other. A string of rosary beads with a golden cross hung from a girdle at her waist. Around her neck lay a silver or gold chain on which hung a pendant, a medallion bearing the image of Christ as the Lamb of God.

Led by Andrews and followed by the two earls, Mary walked along the corridor and into a larger room where her household was waiting to greet her and bid her farewell. An eyewitness (perhaps the Earl of Kent himself) wrote that she exhorted her servants to fear God and live in obedience. She kissed her women servants and gave her hand to her menservants to kiss. She asked them not to grieve for her, but to rejoice and pray for her. One of them afterward reported that she showed no fear and even smiled.

Mary then descended the stairs toward the great hall on the ground floor. Her legs were so swollen and inflamed by rheumatism, she leaned for support on the arms of two soldiers. When the procession reached the anteroom of the hall, they encountered Andrew Melville, her steward, who knelt and fighting back tears cried out, Madam, it will be the sorrowfullest message that I ever carried, when I shall report that my queen and dear mistress is dead.

Mary answered, also weeping, You ought to rejoice rather than weep for that the end of Mary Stuart’s troubles is now come. Carry this message, she continued, and tell my friends that I die a true woman to my religion, and like a true Scottish woman and a true French woman.

As Mary recovered her composure, her mood abruptly changed. She glanced back up the stairs and exclaimed that she was evil attended. She demanded for womanhood’s sake that her own servants should escort her. She harangued the earls, who became fearful that she would cause an even bigger scene and have to be dragged violently into the great hall.

Shrewsbury feebly claimed that he and Kent were simply following orders. Hearing this, Mary bridled: Far meaner persons than myself have not been denied so small a favor. Madam, replied Kent, it cannot well be granted, for that it is feared lest some of them would with speeches both trouble and grieve Your Grace and disquiet the company . . . or seek to wipe their napkins in some of your blood, which were not convenient.

My lord, said Mary, I will give my word and promise for them that they shall not do any such thing. She could not stop herself adding, You know that I am cousin to your queen, and descended from the blood of Henry VII, a married queen of France and the anointed queen of Scotland.

The earls huddled together, whispering inaudibly, then gave in to Mary, who was used to getting her own way. Her two favorite gentlewomen, Jane Kennedy and Elizabeth Curie, and four of her gentlemen, including Melville, were allowed to join the procession. Allons donc, said Mary, smiling again—Now let us go. She spoke in French because this and Lowland Scots were her native tongues; English she had learned only with difficulty in her captivity.

Her retinue now made ready, she strode purposefully into the great hall with Melville carrying her train. It was self-consciously a royal entry; Mary walked before the hundred or so spectators straight toward the focal point, a wooden stage that had been hastily constructed over the previous two days beside an open fireplace in which a great pile of logs blazed. She mounted the two steps that led up to the platform and sat down on a low stool that was offered to her, after which the earls seated themselves on her right while the sheriff stood on her left.

There was of course no throne. The stage was a scaffold two feet high and twelve feet square, shrouded with black cotton sheets that hung low over the sides to camouflage the rough joinery, with a rail eighteen inches high around three sides and the unenclosed fourth side in full view of the spectators in the lower end of the hall. There was a cushion for Mary to kneel on, this beside an execution block also swathed in black.

Two masked men stood in readiness on the platform, one Bull, the headsman of the Tower of London, and his assistant. They were dressed in long black gowns with white aprons, their ax laid casually against the rail. In the lower end of the space, the knights and gentlemen of Northamptonshire and its neighboring counties looked toward the stage flanked by a troop of soldiers, their view unrestricted because the platform had been set at the right height. Outside in the courtyard, beyond the passageway at the main entrance to the great hall, a large crowd of another thousand or so waited for news.

The sheriff called for silence, after which Robert Beale, the clerk of Elizabeth’s Privy Council and the man responsible for delivering the execution warrant to Fotheringhay, read it out. As he spoke—the warrant would have taken about ten minutes to read—Mary sat completely still. She showed no emotion, listening, as Robert Wingfield of Upton, Northamptonshire, who was within ten yards of her, reported, with as small regard as if it had not concerned her at all; and with as cheerful a countenance as if it had been a pardon. Her nerve was to be tested, however, when Dr. Richard Fletcher, Dean of Peterborough, and at this time one of Elizabeth’s favorite preachers, stepped forward at the Earl of Shrewsbury’s signal.

Fletcher, the father of the dramatist John Fletcher, who was Shakespeare’s collaborator on Henry VIII, had been brought in to deliver a setpiece admonition to Mary that strictured her for her traitorous Catholicism, and to lead the assembly in prayers. He was one of Elizabeth’s chaplains in ordinary, renowned for his comely person and courtly speech.

But his admonition backfired spectacularly; the attempted sermon—for that is all it was—was the greatest faux pas of his career. When the moment came, he started to stammer nervously. Madam, he began, the queen’s most excellent majesty; Madam, the queen’s most excellent majesty . . . Three times he stumbled, but when he started for the fourth, Mary cut him off. In a clear and unwavering voice, she said, Mr. Dean, I will not hear you. You have nothing to do with me, nor I with you.

Fletcher, somewhat abashed, countered, I say nothing but that I will justify before the majesty of the mighty God. He was not at first willing to give way to her, believing that God would never abandon the just, but would minister to them through his angels. If Mary had been condemned to die, it was God’s work and the preacher would be called to account for his sermon only before God.

Hearing this, Mary got into her stride, as she always did in an argument. I am settled, she said, in the ancient Roman Catholic religion, and mind to spend my blood in defense of it.

Fletcher unwisely responded, Madam, change your opinion and repent you of your former wickedness, and settle your faith only in Jesus Christ, by him to be saved. This was not the way to speak to a queen. Mary, visibly coloring, ordered him to be silent. There was an awkward pause. Then the earls gave way. Fletcher was told to omit the sermon, which in a fit of pique he insisted be transcribed from his notes into a report of the day’s proceedings.

A bizarre, even farcical scene ensued. The Earl of Kent urged Fletcher to begin the prayers, but as the dean started speaking again, Mary prayed loudly and in Latin with her crucifix before her eyes.

There followed a battle of wills, because as the knights and gentlemen in the hall joined Fletcher in his versicles and responses, Mary and her six servants shouted louder and louder until the queen, in tears, slipped off her stool, at which point she knelt and continued as before.

Even after Fletcher had ceased praying, Mary carried on, in English now to cause maximum embarrassment. She prayed for the Church, for an end to religious discord, for her son, the twenty-year-old James VI of Scotland—whom her enemies had brought up as a Protestant—that he might be converted to the true Catholic faith. She prayed that Elizabeth might prosper and long continue to reign, serving God aright. She confessed that she hoped to be saved by and in the blood of Christ at the foot of whose crucifix she would willingly shed her blood. She petitioned the saints to pray for her soul, and that God would in his great mercy and goodness avert his plagues from this silly island.

To the Earl of Kent, himself a staunch Protestant, this was highly offensive. Madam, he said, settle Christ Jesus in your heart and leave those trumperies. But Mary ignored him. Eventually she finished, kissing the crucifix and making the sign of the cross in the Catholic way.

This was largely contrived. Mary had never truly been the ideological Catholic that she now wished to appear to the world. She was far too political for that. As a ruler in Scotland, she had sensibly accepted a compromise based on the religious status quo and the inroads made by the Protestant Reformation. Only after her imprisonment in England had she reinvented herself as a poor Catholic woman persecuted for her religion alone. What happened in the great hall at Fotheringhay was for show, and it worked. By humiliating Fletcher, Mary won a propaganda victory that resounded around Catholic Europe.

Satisfied, she calmly turned to Bull, who meekly knelt and sought her forgiveness. She answered, I forgive you with all my heart, for now, I hope, you shall make an end of all my troubles.

The executioners helped Mary’s gentlewomen to undress her down to her petticoat. As they unbuttoned her, she smiled broadly and joked that she never had such grooms before to make her unready nor did she ever put off her clothes before such a company.

She laid her crucifix and prayer book on her stool, and one of the executioners took the medallion from around her neck, since custom allowed that such personal items were a perquisite. But Mary interposed, saying that she would give these things to her servants and that he would receive money in lieu of them.

As Mary’s veil and black outer garments were removed, stifled cries of shock and astonishment reverberated around the hall. Her petticoat was of tawny velvet, her inner bodice of tawny satin. One of her gentlewomen handed her a pair of tawny sleeves with which she immediately covered her arms. A metamorphosis had occurred.

For several minutes Mary stood stock still on the stage, clad in the color of dried blood: the liturgical color of martyrdom in the Roman Catholic Church. It was a sight so melodramatic, so abhorrent to the earls, that they omitted all reference to it from their official report to the Privy Council. The incident is known only from a contemporary French account based on the reports of Mary’s attendants, which is confirmed by two independent English accounts, one by Shrewsbury’s servant, who was writing to a friend and had no reason to lie.

Mary kissed her gentlewomen, who burst into uncontrolled fits of sobbing. Ne criez vous, she said, j’ai promis pour vous. Or as one of the English eyewitness accounts renders it, Peace, peace, cry not, I have promised the contrary, cry not for me but rejoice.

She raised her hands and blessed them, and turning to her other servants, Melville especially, who were weeping aloud and continually crossing themselves, she prayed in Latin and blessed them too, bade them farewell, and asked them to remember her in their prayers.

She knelt down most resolutely on the cushion while Jane Kennedy covered her eyes with a white Corpus Christi cloth embroidered in gold that Mary had chosen the previous night. Jane kissed the cloth, tied it around Mary’s face in the shape of a triangle and pinned it securely to her cap. The two gentlewomen then left the platform.

As Mary knelt, she recited in Latin the psalm In te Domino confido, In thee, O Lord, have I put my trust. Reaching out for the block, she laid down her head, positioning her chin carefully with her hands and holding them there, so that if one of the executioners had not moved them, they would have been cut off. She stretched out her arms and legs and cried, In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meurmInto your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit. She repeated these words three or four times until, with one executioner holding down her body, the other severed her head.

Except it was the headsman’s turn to blunder. It should have taken only a single blow, but the strain was too great even for England’s most experienced executioner. His first strike was misaligned, and the blow fell on the knot of the blindfold, missing the neck and hacking into the back of the head. One account says Mary made a very small noise, but another says she cried out in agony, Lord Jesus receive my soul. A second strike severed the neck, but not completely, and the executioner sliced through the remaining sinews, using the ax as a cleaver. At length he raised the head, shouting God save the queen. An audible gasp went up from the hall, because Mary’s lips were still moving as if in prayer, and continued to do so for a quarter of an hour.

And then the final twist. As the executioner lifted up the head, Mary’s auburn curls and white cap became detached from her skull. The illusion of monarchy dissolved as the executioner found himself clutching a handful of hair while the head fell back to the floor, rolling like a misshapen football toward the spectators, who saw that it was very grey and near bald.

Suddenly everything was clear. The Queen of Scots had worn a wig. The assembly was struck dumb, until the Earl of Shrewsbury could stand it no longer and burst into tears.

As the executioner retrieved the skull, Dr. Fletcher recovered his wits. He bellowed, So perish all the queen’s enemies, to which the Earl of Kent, standing over the corpse, echoed, Such be the end of all the queen’s and the gospel’s enemies. But it was a gruesome finale, a harrowing catharsis. Even in the London theaters, where revenge plays and tragedies were newly in vogue, no one had seen anything quite like this.

Mary’s distraught servants were led from the scene and locked in their rooms. The executioners were disrobing the corpse when one of them saw that her favorite pet dog, a Skye terrier, had hidden itself in the folds of her petticoat and sneaked onto the stage. When detected, it ran about wailing miserably and lay down in the widening pool of blood between her severed head and shoulders. Since it could not be coaxed away, it was forcibly removed and washed, whereupon it refused to eat. One of Mary’s servants claimed it soon died, but this is not corroborated.

In the afternoon, by order of the earls, the black cotton sheets, the execution block and cushion, Mary’s clothes and ornaments, and anything else with blood on it were burned in the open fireplace so that no relics of the martyrdom she had so conspicuously sought to evoke could be obtained by her Catholic supporters. Still present in the great hall to observe these cleansing operations were the knights and gentlemen of the county, and when the earls wrote their official account of the execution, these men signed their names to the report as solemn witnesses.

The Earl of Shrewsbury’s fourth son, Henry Talbot, was sent posthaste to London to deliver the report to the Privy Council that same night. When he had departed, the mortal remains of the dead queen were put on a stretcher and carried back upstairs to be embalmed. The scaffold was demolished and everyone except the sheriff, who had the job of burying the heart and inner organs in a secret place within the foundations of the castle, was sent home. Some of Mary’s ornaments must also have been buried in the deep recesses of the castle, because the ring she was given at her betrothal to her second husband, Henry Lord Darnley, was later unearthed in the ruins and exhibited at Peterborough in 1887.

No one who had witnessed Mary’s last day could ever have forgotten it. Whatever view is taken of her character, whatever credence is given to the stories told about her as a way of justifying her forced abdication and execution, the business on that day was regicide. Mary was an anointed queen. Elizabeth, her fellow sovereign as much as her rival for the past thirty years, was herself all too anxious to defend the ideal of monarchy: the principle that rulers were accountable to God alone. She had done everything possible to prevent Mary’s execution until she felt it could no longer be avoided, and then to shift the blame for it onto the shoulders of others.

Elizabeth had a firm grasp of the issues. She knew that Mary’s death would alter the way that monarchy was regarded in the British Isles. A regicide would give a massive boost to Parliament, diminishing forever the divinity that hedges a king. It would help to propagate the theory of popular sovereignty—the belief that political power lies in the people and not in the ruler—and the idea that the representatives of the people were those they elected to Parliament. This was the ideology invoked by Mary’s rebel lords in Scotland to depose her. And the same theory would be instilled there, and more subversively in parts of France, for 250 years after her death, finally to cross the Atlantic when Dr. William Small, a Scot, taught ethics and political science to the young Thomas Jefferson at the College of William and Mary in Virginia.

How did so versatile a queen as Mary, one so beautiful and intelligent, so convivial and down-to-earth, so full of life and irresistible, end up disgraced and deposed? One of the reasons is that Elizabeth’s chief minister and leading adviser for forty years, William Cecil, was her antagonist. More than anyone else, he was her great nemesis. Unlike Elizabeth, Mary was a Catholic, and Cecil’s overriding ambition was to remold the whole of the British Isles into a single Protestant community. He had little room for an independent Scotland, hence his intermittent clashes with his Scottish allies over the extent of English domination. Whereas Elizabeth did all she could to protect the ideal of divine-right monarchy irrespective of the religion of its incumbent, Cecil believed that Parliament had the right to settle the succession to the throne on religious grounds, meaning that Mary’s dynastic claim had at all costs to be discounted.

In death as in life, Mary always aroused the strongest feelings. To her apologists she was an innocent victim. She was mishandled and traduced: a political pawn in the hands of those perfidious Scottish lords and ambitious French and English politicians who found her inconvenient and in their way. To her critics she was fatally flawed. She was far too affected by her emotions. She ruled from the heart and not the head. She was a femme fatale, a manipulative siren, who flaunted her sexuality in dancing and banqueting and did not care who knew it.

Her enemies largely won the argument. Mary has come down to us not as a shrewd and charismatic young ruler who relished power and, for a time, managed to hold together a fatally unstable country, but rather as someone who cared more about her luxuries and pets. She knew how to play to the gallery. One of the accounts of her execution dismissed her as transcending the skills of the most accomplished actress. But a sense of theater was essential to the exercise of power in the sixteenth century, and there was far more to Mary than so cynical a judgment implies.

This book tries to get to the truth about her, or as close to the truth as possible: to see her not merely as a bundle of stereotypes or as a convenient and tenuously linked series of myths, but as a whole woman whose choices added up and whose decisions made sense. The rationale relates closely to the method: to write Mary’s life and tell her story using the original documents rather than relying on the familiar printed collections or edited abstracts, themselves often compiled to perpetuate rather than to engage with the legends. It may come as a surprise to learn that such documents survive in voluminous quantities, preserved in archives and research libraries as far apart as Edinburgh, Paris, London, the stately homes of England, and Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. Some of them have not been read by a historian since 1840. Many have not been freshly examined since the 1890s, and among these are unrecognized handwritten transcripts of two of the famous Casket Letters.

The aim is to tell Mary’s story, where possible letting her speak for herself in her own words, but also to consider why the stories of others about the very same events are often so strikingly different. Only when this is done can the myriad of facts be properly sifted, the sequence of events be explained and understood, and a searchlight cast on a turbulent life.

1

The First Year

MARY STUART was born in the coldest of winters. Snow blanketed the ground, and the narrow pathways and rough winding tracks between England and Scotland were completely blocked. The cattle that roamed the Lowlands and the valleys of the border region during the summer months were crouching in their low stone byres. The River Tweed, often a raging torrent as it flowed to the sea at Berwick-upon-Tweed on the eastern side of the border, was frozen over. Whereas it normally took a rider five or six days to carry important dispatches from Edinburgh to London, the news of Mary’s birth took four days to reach Alnwick in Northumberland, only a few miles south of Berwick.

The new baby was the only daughter and sole surviving heir of James V of Scotland and his second queen, Mary of Guise. She was born at Linlithgow Palace, some seventeen miles west of Edinburgh, on Friday, December 8, 1542.

The deep frost scarcely troubled the occupants of the queen’s suite on the third floor of the northwest tower of the palace. Recent construction had transformed Linlithgow into a luxurious residence. James V had lavish tastes and sought to introduce the latest Renaissance styles. The windows of the palace were glazed, the ceilings painted, the stonework and woodwork intricately carved with crowns and thistles. In the great hall and throughout the dozen or so rooms of the royal apartments, logs blazed in the fireplaces. The finest Flemish tapestries and hangings of rich arras and cloth of gold covered the stone walls to keep out drafts.

Linlithgow, along with Falkland in Fife, was a favorite lodging of Mary of Guise. She had helped to redesign both palaces like French châteaux. This was hardly surprising, because she was herself French. She was the widowed Duchess of Longueville, the eldest daughter of Claude, Duke of Guise, and his wife, Antoinette of Bourbon. The Guises were one of the most powerful noble families in France. Their patrimonial seat was at Joinville in the Champagne region, their estates scattered across strategically important areas of northern and eastern France.

The family of her first husband, Louis d’Orléans, Duke of Longueville, owned significant estates in the Loire region, so Mary of Guise knew all about Renaissance palaces. She compared Linlithgow for its elegance and picturesque setting to the châteaux of the Loire, where the French royal family lived when not near Paris. Like Chenonceaux, the jewel of the Loire, Linlithgow was a pleasure palace partly surrounded by water. The outer walls stood on a semicircular knoll extending into the loch on the north side, overlooking St. Michael’s parish church and the town of Linlithgow to the south.

Mary Stuart was born at a turning point in history. Only two weeks before, on November 24, her father’s forces had been routed by the English at the battle of Solway Moss. To the Scots, England was the auld enemy. Relations between the two neighbors had smoldered since Edward I had claimed the feudal overlordship of Scotland and tried to annex the country in the 1290s. The Scots sought French and papal support, and fostered a hardy patriotism in defense of their kingdom’s independence. A score of English invasions after 1296 ushered in a period of hostility that lasted for five or more generations.

Border skirmishes were the norm. Outright war was the exception, not least because the two countries were so unequally matched. England was so much richer and more powerful than its northern neighbor. Its population was around 3.5 million, Scotland’s barely 850,000. The only Scottish town of any size was Edinburgh, where 13,000 people lived. This was at most a fifth of London’s population. It was far easier to raise taxes and levy troops in England than in Scotland, since the machinery of government was more centralized and the chain of command more efficient. A set-piece battle would almost inevitably end in a crushing defeat for the Scots.

There were regional inequalities within Scotland. Between a third and a half of the population lived in the border region and the Highlands, while the rest occupied the more prosperous and cosmopolitan Lowlands. The king was advised by the lords in Parliament, but although the Scottish Parliament was supposed to represent the whole country, it tended to stereotype highlanders and borderers as chancers and criminals. The Highland clans stood aloof from the rest of the country, and as a rule the highlanders and lowlanders had a tacit agreement to ignore one another. Many highlanders spoke Gaelic rather than Lowland Scots, exacerbating cultural differences. The language of the lowlanders was in fact much closer to northern English than to anything spoken by highlanders.

The politics of Scotland were tribal: blood ties and kin culture were predominant. Behind the feudal lord lay the more ancient status of chief of a clan or kindred. Loyalty to kin placed the Scottish lords at the head of networks sometimes covering entire regions and shaping the structures of power at every level. The monarchy itself relied on these structures and on what it could redistribute from the patronage of the Church.

The wars within the British Isles resumed under Henry VIII, who acceded to the English throne in 1509. Henry was a strong leader. He saw himself as an English patriot and also as a military strategist. His ambition was to resume the Hundred Years War against France and to win conquests there. Of his royal predecessors, those he admired most were the Black Prince and Henry V, whose glorious victories in France brought them lands and reputation. Repeatedly the efforts of his councilors were bedeviled by his chivalric dreams. But war was the sport of kings. And if Henry sought to conquer French territory, he had to deal first with Scotland, France’s auld ally and England’s back door. A popular rhyme quipped: Who that intendeth France to win, with Scotland let him begin. Henry was fond of quoting it, and he put its lessons into practice.

Typically, the defeat of the Scots at Solway Moss was less the result of a full-scale English invasion than of a border skirmish that went tragically wrong. The disaster stemmed less from Henry VIII’s aggression than from James V’s decision to launch a counterattack on an epic scale without choosing the ground or the moment carefully enough.

In reaction to the incursions of English forces led by the Duke of Norfolk, James sent an army to pillage the disputed territory to the north and east of Carlisle known as the Debatable Land. His troops forded the River Esk at low tide. When they returned, it was high tide and they were caught between the river and a bog. Forced to retreat by a smaller but better-disciplined English battalion, the Scots were snared. Around 1200 were taken prisoner, including 23 important nobles and lairds, who were dispatched as hostages to London, where they were put in the Tower.

James V felt a deep psychological blow. He had been militarily and personally humiliated, his loss of face the greater in that he had been ensconced safely at a distance and was not leading his troops. Cowardice was not the issue. James was a brave warrior, but he misjudged the risks. The result was a disintegration of his forces. It was a more damaging loss to his reputation than that suffered thirty years before by his father, James IV, whose own army had been cut to pieces at Flodden Field by the father of the very same English commander. The political effects of both defeats—a long royal minority—were identical. But in 1513, at least the Scots had been scythed down in hand-to-hand combat during a set-piece battle. They died honorably rather than like rats in a trap.

James V rode to Linlithgow to see his wife begin her confinement, but almost instantly left for Edinburgh and then Falkland, where he took to his bed. It is unlikely that he loved his wife, since he had so many mistresses. But he cared greatly about his baby, and his sudden departure tells us more about his mental state than about his family ties. He went to pieces when told that his heir was not a boy. His two infant sons had died the previous year, and now his thoughts turned to Marjorie Bruce, King Robert I’s daughter and the founder of the Stuart dynasty. He exclaimed: The devil go with it! It will end as it began. It came from a woman, and it will end in a woman. Or as a more colloquial source says, It came with a lass, and it will pass with a lass.

James died at midnight on December 14. He was only thirty, but had suffered recurrent illnesses. A life of sexual dissipation, leading to pox and endemic fevers, and a serious hunting accident had weakened his immune system. His last symptoms, a marvelous vomit and a great lax, suggest dysentery as the cause of death, perhaps the result of drinking contaminated water. Other possible causes were pestilence, or cholera, caught from the Earl of Atholl, with whom James had been carousing and who had just died.

James V died of natural causes, unlike his father, who had perished at Flodden in the murkiest of circumstances. Although seemingly killed by the English in the battle, it is just as likely that he was murdered in the closing stages of the fight by one of his rebellious lords.

His son had succeeded him at the age of seventeen months. Now history had repeated itself. His granddaughter, Mary Stuart, was queen at the age of six days.

She was baptized as soon as it was safe to take her into the cold outside air. She traveled the short distance from the south-side gateway of Linlithgow Palace into St. Michael’s Church in the arms of her nurse, Janet Sinclair. She was named Mary after her mother, but also because her birthday was the day celebrated by the Roman Catholic Church as the day the Virgin Mary had been conceived.

After baptism at the font, Mary was anointed with chrism and wrapped in a robe of white taffeta of Genoa that had been specially made for the occasion. Almost certainly (for such was the practice with royal children) she was then brought to the high altar and confirmed, although she did not take the sacrament at Mass until she was nine years old. A report reached Henry VIII that she was a very weak child and not like to live. This was wide of the mark, and what shortly became a more insidious threat to her security and peaceful succession would be dispelled by her mother’s courage.

James V’s death was to set in motion a complex chain of events in which political, religious and factional maneuvers relentlessly combined. England and France were competing to assert a hegemony over Scotland, which became a pawn in the struggle between the two larger countries and their ruling dynasties. As a child, Mary played no role herself in these intrigues, but all of them were about her. The aim of each and every plot was either to secure physically the person of the infant queen or else to marry her into the English or French royal family as a guarantee of future influence. Such machinations helped to shape the dynastic legacy Mary would inherit as she grew older, and all combined to set the agenda she would bravely confront when she reached the age of majority.

Throughout Mary’s formative years, her mother was her example. In Scotland for less than five years when her daughter was born, Mary of Guise was politically astute if on a steep learning curve. She quickly turned her mind to politics, keeping the obsequies for her late husband to a minimum.

She was unusually tall, with auburn hair and delicate features. Her manner was regal, her cheekbones high, her eyebrows raised and arched, her forehead elevated. Her lips were slightly compressed, her nose tending to appear aquiline when viewed from the side. Her deportment was confident and dignified; she was intelligent and attentive, generous to friends and supporters, with easy yet polished manners, affable to equals and inferiors alike.

These were all consummate Guise qualities: James V’s widow quickly won admiring hearts in Scotland. She was popular with the ordinary people and was able to inspire fervent loyalty. All these same qualities would later be visible in her daughter, who came to resemble her mother closely in looks and personality.

Mary of Guise learned her political skills from her family. Comparative arrivistes, the Guises had risen at the French court through a combination of shrewd marriages and military prowess. Closely linked in Francis I’s reign to the triumvirate comprising Anne de Montmorency, Constable of France, the Dauphin Henry, heir to the throne, and his beautiful and sophisticated mistress Diane de Poitiers, they were equally influential in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Duke Claude’s brother Jean was a pluralist who managed to accumulate nine bishoprics and six abbeys. His pickings included the cardinal-archbishopric of Rheims, the most important diocese in France; it was at the great Gothic cathedral of Rheims that the kings of France were crowned. Moreover, the Guises kept it in the family by having it bestowed before Jean’s death on Claude’s second son, Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, who took possession of it at the age of fourteen.

In all, Claude had ten surviving children, each of whom held a significant position in state or church. When Mary of Guise married James V, she began fifty years of her family’s involvement at the hub of Scottish, French and English affairs. This was because diplomatic alliances were sealed by marriage pacts in the sixteenth century. International politics centered around families, children and the succession to hereditary rights, and in dynastic circles such concerns took precedence over religious affiliations.

Mary of Guise understood her own role perfectly. She set out to protect her daughter’s birthright and safeguard the traditional auld alliance between France and Scotland. She was used to the call of duty. The most eligible widow in France at the age of twenty-one, she was selected by Francis I to succeed his own daughter Madeleine, James V’s first wife, who fell victim to a viral infection within weeks of landing at the port of Leith. She had been reluctant to leave France, but honor required her to do so. She was not unaccustomed to misfortune. Three of her five children died in infancy: one son by her first husband (another boy, Francis, survived until 1551) and both her sons by James.

After her wedding in Scotland, Mary of Guise regularly wrote to her own mother, Antoinette of Bourbon, a matriarchal figure of whom it was said even the French king was in awe. Her letters show that she quickly adjusted to her new life. She tolerated her husband’s infidelities—he sired seven, and probably nine, illegitimate children—and spent her time supervising building projects at the royal palaces and laying out the gardens, where she grew an exotic range of ornamental fruit trees from cuttings sent from France. At Falkland Palace, where her stylish improvements to the façade may still be seen, she personally inspected the work, climbing a ladder to take a closer look before authorizing payment to the stonemasons. She had her own French domestic staff, as it was unthinkable that her intimate servants could be Scots: the French frequently made ribald jokes about the vulgarity of the Scots behind their backs. Her servants adored her, and after James V’s death, several of his own domestic staff tried to negotiate a transfer to her employment because she paid higher wages than anyone else.

Technically, the infant Mary was Queen of Scots from the moment her father died. In practice, this was a fiction. A governor or regent would have to be appointed to rule until she was declared to be of age and able to govern herself. What was uppermost in everyone’s mind was who exactly would be chosen, since a long royal minority was an invitation to noble infighting. This especially applied to Scotland, where the monarchy was so much weaker than in England or France, and the crown relied on the kinship networks of the lords to help maintain law and order.

The most binding way to appoint a regent was in the will of the dying ruler. Although James V had not done this—probably because he did not know his death was close at hand—his last will and testament was manufactured on his behalf. It was conveniently framed by David Beaton, Cardinal-Archbishop of St. Andrews, the magnate who had exercised the greatest influence on the living king and was determined to keep himself in power.

Beaton led the pro-French faction and was a staunch opponent of the Protestant Reformation. He sought to claim the posts of tutors testamentary to Mary and governors of the kingdom for himself and three of his allies. His aim was to preempt the claim of the strongest alternative candidate, James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, who was pro-English and heir apparent to the crown should Mary die. Arran, for his part, loudly proclaimed that Beaton had forged the will, saying that as James V had lapsed into semiconsciousness, Beaton had caused him to subscribe a blank paper on which it was to be inscribed.

The nobles voted for Arran as governor, but he was hardly the ideal candidate. The best thing ever said about him is that he was a survivor. Weak, vacillating and cowardly, he was also exceptionally greedy. His legitimacy was questioned by Beaton, but as the grandson of James II’s eldest daughter, he had a right by blood to the regency.

Although Mary of Guise did not challenge his appointment, she was wary of Arran. She knew that his policy was less the protection of the infant queen than advancement for himself and his family, hitting the mark when she described him as a simple and the most inconstant man in the world, for whatsoever he determineth today, he changeth tomorrow.

Arran spent six weeks moving into his new palaces and surrounding himself with his friends and relations, to whom he awarded pensions. In an attempt at reconciliation, he nominated Beaton to the chancellorship, one of the greatest offices of state; but, proving the accuracy of the dowager queen’s assessment, he changed his mind two weeks later and threw Beaton into prison.

The new governor was steeped in Scottish tradition. He was well aware of the role played by violence in society and politics. He quickly seized all of James V’s castles except Stirling, which was part of Mary of Guise’s dowry and still her property. Then, as soon as he felt sufficiently confident, he began to pay attention to Henry VIII’s efforts to influence Scottish affairs.

Henry was determined to outwit and outmaneuver France. He wanted Arran to nurture a pro-English faction in Scotland that would displace French influence there. He meant to use the hostages taken at Solway Moss to this end. Henry was about to declare war on France. He had already agreed with his main European ally, Charles V, king of Spain as well as Holy Roman Emperor, that they would join forces in a coordinated attack, seeking to partition France between them.

Henry had an ambitious dynastic plan. He wanted to rule the whole of the British Isles. Naturally he seized his opportunity as soon as James V died, leaving a baby as queen. From the beginning of his reign, he had reiterated Edward I’s claim to the feudal overlordship of Scotland. It was a formula he had learned by heart. Later, when he quarreled with the pope and broke finally with Rome in order to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, he evolved a theory of imperial kingship, designed to justify his title of Supreme Head of the English Church, but in which he also envisaged himself as king and emperor of the whole of the British Isles.

According to Henry’s version of law and history, Scotland, despite being an independent state and a sovereign realm, would become a satellite of England, a jewel within the orb of Henry’s imperial crown. It was the beginning of the Tudor claim to an Anglo-British empire that, while Mary was still a child, was to provoke the French counterclaim to a Franco-British one.

Henry first released the twenty-three Scots hostages from the Tower, then invited them to admire his recently completed palace at Hampton Court. They were to join him there as his guests for the sumptuous Christmas revels.

Before allowing them to leave, Henry bound them to support his dynastic plan. All were expected to sign articles obliging them to send their infant queen to England. Mary was to be kept there, to be brought up by Henry until she could be married to Prince Edward, then a boy of five, his son and heir by his marriage to Jane Seymour. In addition, ten of the most important hostages agreed to uphold Henry’s immediate claim to the throne of Scotland should Mary unexpectedly die.

In March 1543, Sir Ralph Sadler was sent to Edinburgh as Henry’s ambassador to negotiate a treaty. The centerpiece was to be Mary’s marriage to Edward. She was less than four months old, but Henry was in earnest. Such a union could enable him to achieve his goal at a single stroke. Sadler, who did not quite know what to expect, began by meeting Arran in the garden of the palace of Holyroodhouse at Edinburgh. He found him evasive and ill briefed. Arran took the narrowest view of the negotiations: he simply wanted to know what was in it for him. He demanded bribes and rewards, and a promise that he would continue to rule as regent if Henry had his way.

After these inconclusive talks, Sadler rode to meet Mary and her mother at Linlithgow. He wanted to see Mary for himself, because Henry kept asking him about her. Her mother played along, asking a nurse to unwrap her out of her clothes so she could be inspected. Sadler dandled Mary on his knee and reported, I assure Your Majesty, it is as goodly a child as I have seen of her age, and as like to live, with the grace of God.

Sadler then broached the topic of Mary’s betrothal to Henry’s son. To his amazement, Mary of Guise was positive, offering to help and even endorsing the English plan to take Mary to London for safekeeping. Her reaction was so different from Sadler’s expectation, he was at first nonplused. He suspected some juggling, and he was right. Mary of Guise dissembled. But she had a clear purpose, which now unfolded. Whereas Henry VIII wanted to subordinate Scotland to England through a dynastic marriage that detached the country permanently from French influence, Mary of Guise was equally determined to protect French and Guise interests there. And if Arran tried to marginalize her by negotiating with England behind her back, she would pretend to ally with England too, lulling Sadler into a false sense of security and so outflanking Arran, who would remain at a disadvantage as long as he lacked physical custody of Mary.

Mary of Guise had good reason to suspect Arran, who had severed her channels of communication with France. He had planted spies in her household and sought to intercept her letters. She did get one message through. Antoinette of Bourbon had received news of her daughter’s troubles by June 10, sending word to her sons at Francis I’s court to see if any pressure could be applied to assist her.

Arran’s actions, swiftly following Beaton’s arrest, were meant to undermine the pro-French party. The governor had decided to ally with Henry VIII. As if to cement his links to the English king, he issued a surprise declaration in support of Henry VIII’s break with Rome and the dissolution of the monasteries. Arran’s action was the more bizarre in that he was still a Catholic who acknowledged the authority of the pope. But he was increasingly on the defensive, caught between the pro-French and pro-English lords, who were evenly divided: the moment was right for a coup.

In charming and beguiling Henry VIII’s ambassador Sadler, Mary of Guise showed her political skill. A plan had formed in her mind. She would move Mary from Linlithgow, a pleasure palace that could not withstand a siege, to the security of her own castle of Stirling, an almost impregnable fortress at the top of a steep rock that was also near enough to the coast to restore her links to France by sea.

Already she had sent a trusted servant to Stirling with coffers packed with clothes and household goods. Larger consignments of beds and furniture followed, with further deliveries of silver plate, tableware, linen, dry foodstuffs and kitchen utensils such as pots, pans and roasting spits.

Arran insisted that no one was to leave Linlithgow. Mary of Guise ignored him, playing her cards brilliantly. She spun Sadler the

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